The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  It was Bakewell's opinion that Loch's work in the Highlands was probably no better than his activities in Staffordshire where he was well-hated for his evictions. ‘He ejected a poor man, his wife and six small children from their humble cottage upon Tittensor hills, in a cold season of the year, the wife having been brought to bed one month and three days at the time of the ejectment being executed…. I found them encamped in the open air like gipsies.’

  It was Loch's apparent hypocrisy, encased in its burnished shell of righteousness, that angered Bakewell. He derided the Commissioner's claim to be improving the lot of the people. ‘His eye, like the bright luminary of day, darts its rays upon the sides of the mountains, pierces the deep glens, and peeps through the rafters of these filthy hovels and sees men, their wives and dirty bairns, their cows, pigs, dogs, cats, and a great variety of vermin, all inhabiting the same apartment. His first object is to drive out that master-piece of sloth and uselessness – man and all his retinue. The huts are destroyed; the smoke of the burning moss timber quickly mingles with the clouds. The potato patches are soon converted into beautiful pasture grounds.’

  David Stewart of Garth was another, if more cautious, critic of the Loch Improvements. Since the days when he had marched northward with the 42nd in the Year of the Sheep he had become a distinguished and veteran soldier. Now he was finishing his Sketches of the Highlanders, a loving tapestry of the manners and traditions of the clans, the valour of their regiments. The two honest volumes of this work were to become source-books for a romantic mythology that would anaesthetize the conscience of Scotland long after the people described in them had been driven from their hills. Publication of the Sketches followed close on Loch's book, and Stewart was unable to do more than put his comments into footnotes. Two are worth quoting. The first pricks the conceit of Loch's claim that the coastal fisheries of Sutherland had been created to give employment to the people removed from the interior.

  ‘We may turn to an advertisement in the Inverness newspapers, describing sixty lots of land to be let in that country for fishing stations. To this notice is added a declaration that “decided preference will be given to strangers”. Thus, while on the one hand the unfortunate natives are driven from their farms in the interior, a decided preference is given to strangers to settle on the coast.’

  The second examines Loch's frequent and flattering references to his master's philanthropy in the times of hunger and destitution that came with the Improvements. Stewart pointed out that the people of Sutherland had supported one family of earls through seven centuries and twenty generations, implying that it ill became the Countess Elizabeth (or her English husband) to think of them as a burden. The amount of poor relief paid by the parishes before Mr Loch began improving things had been less than £5 a year for every thousand of the people. And Lord Stafford's charity, when one looked into it, appeared to be a canny trick of giving with the one hand and taking back with the other. ‘It has been stated that the starving population have been relieved by remittances to the amount of several thousand pounds in money, grain and meal; but it was not said that good security (or cattle) was taken for payment* of this relief, and that, except in cases of great destitution, where all property had been disposed of to resist a similar calamity, the whole remittances were paid up.’

  Seventeen years after the publication of Loch's book, his Policy was again subjected to analysis and bitter criticism, this time by a Swiss, Simonde de Sismondi, one of the greatest social scientists of that age. ‘There is something so absurd and revolting,’ he said, ‘in interpreting as a form of progress the destruction of the happiness, of the liberty, of the very existence of a race in the interests of wealth.’ Being no Highlander like Stewart or Macleod, with their clansman's lingering wish to excuse the Chief everything and blame his agents for all, Sismondi aimed for the Countess Elizabeth herself:

  ‘Mr Loch meanwhile insists that the Marchioness of Stafford had shown a great deal more humanity than any of her neighbours. She has concerned herself over the lot of those she has removed. She has offered them asylum in her own country, and while she has taken back from them 794,000 acres of land which they had possessed from time immemorial, she has generously left them about 6,000 of these, that is, two acres per family. These 6,000 acres available for use as a refuge for the small tenants were formerly waste, and yielded nothing to the proprietor. All the same, she has not made a gift of them. She has assessed them at an average of two shillings and sixpence an acre, and no leases have been granted for longer than seven years.’

  Sismondi had no patience with the peculiarly British philosophy of laissez-faire, which argued that a man should be free to do what he wished with his own property within the law. ‘If the Marchioness of Stafford was indeed entitled by law to replace the population of an entire province by twenty-nine families of foreigners and some hundreds of thousands of sheep, they should hurry up and abolish such an odious law, both in respect of her and of all the others in her position.’ He recalled that in Switzerland the law gave the peasant a guarantee of ownership in perpetuity ‘while in the British empire it has given this same guarantee to the Scottish lord and left the peasant in insecurity. Let anyone compare the two countries and judge the two systems.’

  Later still in the replies to Loch's book came the stonemason's, and what Donald Macleod had to say, if less literary than the others, was more moving because he was speaking of and for his own people. He could speak a name and touch the shoulder of an old friend. Sismondi knew that the coastal allotments were worthless land, but Macleod had seen them – the bitter, rocky stretch between the mouth of the Naver and Strathy Point, for example, where there was no safe harbour, where the wind came without interruption from the Arctic Circle, and where men were now expected to live on what an inhuman sea chose to offer them. These men Donald Macleod knew. William Mackay who was sucked away by the waves while inspecting his little lot, and while his wife and children watched. John Campbell who was also drowned the same way. And Bell Mackay, a married woman who was taken by the sea while making salt. Robert Mackay, who fell and was killed when collecting plovers' eggs for his starving family. ‘And John Macdonald, while fishing, was swept off the rocks and never seen more.’

  There were improvements, Donald Macleod admitted. ‘Roads, bridges, inns and manses to be sure, for the accommodation of the new gentlemen, tenantry and clergy, but those who spoke the Gaelic tongue were a proscribed race, and everything was done to get rid of them, by driving them into the forlorn hope of deriving subsistence from the sea while squatting on their miserable allotments where, in their wretched hovels, they lingered out an almost hopeless existence.’ The harbours of which Loch was so proud, said Macleod, were often inadequate, and in one year along thirty miles of coast a hundred boats had been destroyed by the sea for want of a safe anchorage. ‘It is lamentable to think that while £1,210,000* were expended on the so-called improvements, besides £500 subscribed by the proprietors for making a harbour, not one shilling of the vast sum was ever expended for behoof of the small tenantry, nor the least pains taken to mitigate their lot.’

  The coastal strips were narrow patches on the cliff's edge, or bordered by bogs and morass. The arable soil was thin – so thin in fact, said Macleod contemptuously, that in any dispute over its ownership one man could have taken away his share in a creel. ‘In many places the spots the poor people endeavoured to cultivate were so steep that while one was delving, another had to hold up the soil with his hands lest it roll into the sea, and from its constant tendency to slide downwards, they had frequently to carry it up again every spring and spread it on the higher parts.’

  Seed was often blown into the sea before it could get a grip on such soil. Salt-blast and mildew destroyed the shafts of green before they grew a few inches. The cattle which the people had brought with them from the emptied glens strayed homeward, on to the new sheep pastures, and were impounded until fines for trespass were paid. Because they had little, if any,
money, the people were asked to pay the fines in kind, in ‘bed and body clothes, watches, rings, pins, brooches, etc., many of these relics of dear and valued relatives’. When the fines could not be paid, the stock stayed in pound. ‘It was nothing strange to see the pinfolds, of twenty or thirty yards square, filled up to the entrance with horses, cows, sheep and goats, promiscuously for nights and days together, in that starving state, trampling on and goring each other.’ Other cattle strayed into the hills and were lost. ‘I have myself seen many instances of the kind where the animals were lying partly consumed by dogs, though still alive, and their eyes picked out by birds of prey.’

  The people occasionally struck back at the Great Cheviot flocks, now and then stealing a young ewe or killing a ram. The gentry formed themselves into an Association for the Suppression of Sheep-stealing in Sutherland, and transported any man found guilty of it. Stafford offered £30 for information that would lead to the conviction of an offender, and one of the Northumbrians, Atkinson or Marshall, was prepared to pay £1,000 for the capture of the ringleaders. The money was never claimed.

  Sismondi said that while Loch had written a great deal about the prosperity and physical changes his employers were bringing to Sutherland, he was curious to know what had happened to those people whom the Commissioner had spoken of (almost in an aside) ‘as having abandoned the mountains of Kildonan and the valleys of the Naver and Helmsdale rivers, and as having left the country altogether’. The observation was ironic. It was well known what had happened to them.

  On 29 July 1819, the Inverness Courier published the following announcement:

  At a numerous meeting of the late Tenants on the Estates of the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford, in the County of Sutherland, and their Friends, held at the Meikle Ferry Inn, Sutherlandshire. 12th June, 1819

  IT WAS UNANIMOUSLY RESOLVED

  1. That from the peculiar and hard situation of the Tenants who have been removed from the Farms on the Estate of Sutherland, they have felt themselves under the grievous necessity of forming a Resolution to abandon their native country and to emigrate to America.

  2. That being in general destitute of money to support them at home, even for a short period, they are compelled to hasten their departure, in order to save the small remnant of their effects, to enable them to encounter the many difficulties and hardships which they clearly forsee await them; and that numbers of them will not be able to muster as much money as will pay their passage to America. In these circumstances many of them will find it impracticable to get a variety of matters settled antecedent to their departure. For this purpose and also for the general benefit of their ill-fated brethren, themselves and their relations in Sutherlandshire, and in foreign countries, they shall and do now form themselves into a Society to be called the SUTHERLAND TRANSATLANTIC FRIENDLY ASSOCIATION.

  This organization, which was to have a short and unhappy existence, was almost entirely the child of its self-appointed Secretary, Mr Thomas Dudgeon of Fearn in the county of Ross. It was broadly hinted by the Press that it had been formed to sustain the flagging fortune of Mr Dudgeon himself, and when, in six months' time, he tried to use it for the recruitment of an alarmingly unofficial militia, Sheriff Macleod of Ross warned all men high and low to have no truck with him. Of his true motives there is no longer record, and it would be uncharitable to judge him on the opinion only of those who wanted no troublesome demonstrations of sympathy for the evicted. His advertisement in the Courier, however, is of great importance. It shows how strong was the feeling for emigration among the people of Sutherland, how great the compulsion of their despair, and how wide the sympathy was for them among the ordinary population.

  The tenants of Strathnaver and Kildonan were not the first to go to America from the Highlands. Emigration had begun three-quarters of a century before as a trickle, and would continue until it was a torrent forty years from now.* But these early Sutherlanders have a particular significance. They were the only Highlanders of the Clearances who were offered the choice between leaving the country or adapting themselves to the plans of the Improvers. They chose exile. They were young, and they believed that by emigration they might preserve their identity as a community and their dignity as a race.

  After the first eviction of the Gunns from Kildonan in 1813, the people sent a deputation to London, led by an unknown minister, perhaps, or a sympathetic advocate, to seek help from the Government and ask redress. The Home Office had no power, and probably no desire, to stand against Lord Stafford. But there was one man who seems to have listened to them – Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, who was settling the plains of Canada along the Red River Valley. He had some Highlandmen there already – Macleans and MacGillivrays, MacEacherns and Living-stones from Mull, Lewis and Argyll. He saw the Sutherlanders and was impressed. ‘They are determined on emigrating in a body,’ he wrote to the Governor of his settlement, ‘They are a fine body of men. I feel quite as much interested in their success as if they were in my own employment.’

  Seven hundred of them applied for grants of land in Selkirk's settlement, which suggests that all and more of the evicted were anxious to go, and which makes nonsense of Loch's claim that the worthless only preferred to emigrate. Selkirk could take a hundred, no more, and these made the party that sailed from Stromness on the Prince of Wales, in convoy with the Eddystone which carried servants and officials of Selkirk's settlement, and under the protection of a sloop-of-war. Selkirk was no philanthropist, he made it clear that the sea-passage would cost each emigrant £10. The money was paid, and many of the people were able to bank more with Selkirk, to be drawn upon when they reached Canada.

  The first year was hard, a winter to be suffered, a country to be broken, bands of Indians and half-breeds to be fought, and some emigrants wrote to their parents at home, advising them against coming the following summer. More left the flat, hill-less grasslands, and went east to where Macdonnells from Glengarry had been settled for thirty years. But in 1815 there was another emigration from Sutherland to the Red River Valley, this time from Upper Kildonan and Farr. Donald Sage was to have gone with them, as their minister and at a salary of £50 a year, to be paid by Selkirk. His father pleaded that he be allowed to remain in Scotland for another year, when his Gaelic would have improved, and to this Selkirk and the emigrants agreed. He never went, and after the last evictions from Strathnaver he left Sutherland altogether. ‘Without our minister,’ declared one emigrant before the Justice at Red River, ‘we would not have come!’

  The spiritual leader of the 1815 emigrants, in place of Donald Sage, was James Sutherland, Seumas Buidhe, the Yellow-haired James, who lived at Ceann-na-Coille on the Helmsdale River. His family had gone with the first party in 1813. The Church gave him authority to marry and to baptize until the arrival of a minister. He did not stay long at the Red River Settlement, his family had left for the East before his arrival, and he soon followed them.* Those Sutherlanders who did remain in the Red River and Rainy Lake country were perhaps the best – Mathesons. MacBeths, Bannermans, Gunns and Mackays. They faced the harsh land with courage. They carried muskets in their hands as they walked behind their ploughs. They fought Métis and Cree to defend the Red River Colony, and they called their land Kildonan. It is still called Kildonan.

  Their going had not disturbed Mr Loch. ‘The idle and lazy alone think of emigration,’ he said.

  3

  THE GENTRY WITH NO PITY

  ‘There is no need for 500 men and 3 fieldpieces’

  MR MACLEOD of Geanies, now known in Dingwall as ‘that fine old country gentleman of olden times’, was still Sheriff-Depute of the County of Ross and as ready as ever for the militant defence of Law, Good Order and Property. On the evening of 28 March 1820, in the library of his ugly house overlooking the Moray Firth, he wrote a letter to declare that prompt action (largely his) had once more saved this part of the Kingdom from riot, anarchy and revolution.

  … and I have further to state that an applicatio
n was made by me to the Lord Advocate of Scotland for such military aid as might be deemed sufficient to enforce the execution of Laws against those who were actually in arms to oppose them.

  He must have remembered similar letters written by him nearly thirty years ago in the Year of the Sheep, and on the same unhappy subject: the Men of Ross and their Seditious Commotions. That circumstances now forced him to defend himself before the public and in the Press like this, was a sad indication of the changes which time could bring. Some things, however, had not changed. In 1792 there had been no doubt, in the minds of Ross-shire gentlemen at least, that their tenantry had been inflamed by the treasonable activities of the Friends of the People and by the poisonous philosophy of Jacobinism. And now for some months it had been apparent that ‘John Bull's evil spirit’ was coming north of the Border again. The death of George III, in January 1820, was followed by demonstrations in England against the person and Ministers of his unpopular successor, and by dragoons swinging sabres against the mob. At the beginning of March the Highlands heard the most unnerving news of all. London peace-officers and Coldstream Guards had broken into a barn in Cato Street, where Arthur Thistlewood and a physical-force remnant of Spencean Philanthropists* were plotting the murder and beheading of the entire Cabinet.

  Highland landowners, heavily committed to eviction and clearance, may have felt that they had special reason to fear the land-nationalization schemes of these Spenceans whom the Government had accused of planning insurrection in 1817. Long before the discovery (if that is the word for it) of the Cato Street Conspiracy, murder and revolution had been darkly rumoured throughout the whole country, and southbound mails from the Highlands had carried frequent resolutions of loyalty to Throne and Parliament (which was the lairds' way of declaring that what they had they intended to hold). The temper of these resolutions, with their promise of armed support for the forces of Law if called upon, had been reassuring to Sheriff Macleod and other officers of the northern shires. Less comforting had been an advertisement published in the Inverness Courier just before Christmas: